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Wednesday Oct 28, 2009

Heading East and remembering my roots

It's been a while since my last post as I've been battling Swine Flu, taking belated summer holidays and moving house. London is a transient place, but when I told the people in my Transition Town I was moving East they all tried to pursuade me to stay!

In fact the last time I saw them I was on my way to meet my new housemates. Jo and I visited my potential growing project to try and think up a solution to the non-progress that was being made. It felt like a handover: we spoke with the woman who runs some courses there and Jo realised that if she went straight to the owners of the site it may be possible to organise something concrete. In retrospect it needed someone with her rational mind and experience and she got on to the housing trust straight away.

Afterwards we met up with a family from Texas who wanted to start a Transition Town in Houston. They are faced with a city literally divided by a big freeway, between the rich and poor sides of town. It seems almost impossible to set up communities there due to the urban sprawl where every trip is a car journey to the centre of town and little satellite shopping districts are virtually non-existent. This is a stark contrast to London where pockets of communities mean people can shop and live locally without relying on cars.

We sat in the park and discussed the challenges of this before I said goodbye. This ties quite nicely with our meeting tonight on local transport. I'm really looking forward to seeing my old community again, they really started to feel like a family! As an avid cyclist and being anti-car it's also an issue I'm really interested in.

In the meantime I have to think about finding a new local community. A woman I knew from another environmental group recently gave me a web link to an umbrella group called Hackney Environment Forum. I've been trawling the website, which has a wealth of events in my area, and I've already decided to continue my food growing passion and volunteer in a tree nursery and edible forest garden project. If you live in London and you're interested in the environment a really useful site, which lists all the environmental projects happening around the city, is http://greenmap.london21.org.

I personally can't wait to get stuck in to some planting again! 

Posted by Laura ( 5:06 PM )
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